Society is increasingly reliant on computers and various computational devices. Moreover, the use of data storage and the transfer data through computer networks utilized by such computational devices has increased dramatically. As such, data integrity has become a growing issue in an ever-increasing data rich environment. Unfortunately, data integrity can be influenced by soft errors introduced during the transfer or storage of data.
Soft errors are errors in a signal or datum. Such errors typically represent an error in the data itself, but not physical damage to the system or a computational device. Soft errors can occur at a system-level, particularly during data transfer, in which noise within the system changes the value of the data. Erroneous data can be sent to memory and can cause problems at a later time. In another example, soft errors can be caused by alpha particle radiation that can hit memory cells and cause a change in the state of the cell. Such soft errors can change instructions within a program or can corrupt data. As such, soft errors can result in reduced reliability of a system or loss of information.
In particular, soft errors can be induced by alpha particle radiation. As such, integrated circuits are packaged using molding compounds that are free of alpha particle emitters, such as uranium, thorium, or boron-10. In the event that boron is used as a filer, the boron source includes little or no boron-10.